A) The renter has no job, no life, and no girlfriend/wife and watches 3 movies a day every day.
B) He's copying the movies to a hard drive and at best, watching them later or collecting them, and at worst, ripping to MPEG4 or VCD and distributing them.
POP3 and IMAP are wireless communication systems when they are used from my laptop connected via 802.11G!!!
Quick lesson on the OSI layers. POP3, IMAP, and the protocol RIM are using are all LAYER 7 stuff, Application layer. The fact that a network is wireless, fiber, ethernet, or carried by pigeon is a LAYER 1 thing... The RIM protocol is not inherently wireless. It's just a scheme for encoding and distributing bits. Those bits happen to be carried by a wireless network, but they could just as well be carried by pigeons.....
So SMS (Short Messaging Service) violates this pattent? I regularly e-mail stuff to "myphonenumber@vtext.com". It goes to Verizon's SMS server and gets pushed to my cell phone. If my phone is off or out of the area, it gets held on the server and pushed when I come back....
How does what RIM is doing infringe on NTP's patent, but POP3 or IMAP does not? If you send me an e-mail and my laptop is "out of range", that is "off" or "not in range of a 802.11 gateway" it goes to my mail server and waits there until I log on. Then I retrieve the buffered messages and display them on my "wireless device".
On top of that, a handheld cell phone does not put out 2 watts. It puts out a maximum of 0.6 watts, less if it can get a stable signal so that it can conserve battery power.
But it IS a free market issue. The network meets and exceeds what the government paid to subsidize, even WITH the bandwidth being witheld for IPTV. They are not preventing an end to end network by their actions. The internet is faster and more robust than it has ever been. But they are holding back a chunk of what they COULD provide. At the moment, absolutely NONE of the bits that comprise this message went across Verizon's network. I Verizon for my home phone, but I could use BrightHouse is I chose Brighthouse is VoIP, but the VoIP traffic stays entirely within BrightHouse's private network and it's quality actually exceeds the quality of the "conventional" phone service I get from Verizon. Or I could use Vonage (or any other VoIP provider) and pass the packets over either Brighthouse or Verizon's broadband connectoon. Or I could use a cell phone from one of a half dozen vendors. I have both Verizon and Brighthouse available to me as my last mile. I have 4 ISP's available through Brighthouse, including RoadRunner (the one I use). And very soon I will have both Verizon and Brighthouse as options for my cable TV, and of course there's always satelite. These changes are bringing MORE choice, not less.
Of course they have the RIGHT. They own the cable. Bought it, installed it, paid for it, and maintain the equipment that lights it up. Now, is it SMART for them to do so? Not sure. But do they have the right? Certainly. If you disagree, don't buy bandwidth from them. If enough people agree with you and don't buy bandwidth from them, then they will decide that it is not smart to hold back bandwidth for their own projects.
We're in a war. Like it or not we are. So... Allow the taps, restrict what can be done with the info. If they are listening for terrorist activity and hear about a drug deal, make sure they CANNOT use that information to prosecute the drug dealer. Restrict the use of the information to terrorist activity only. Clearly and narrowly define what is "terrorist activity".
At the time of the launch I lived in Sarasota, FL. Sarasota is on the west coast of Florida, just south of Tampa. Even though the Cape is on the East coast, nearly 200 miles away, you can clearly see the launches on a clear day. (Night launches are SPETACULAR, but that's another story) I was outside watching the launch. Even from 200 miles away, it was clear that the tank BURST first, the orbiter and solid rockets cut loose from the tank. The orbiter continued upward due to momentum. The SRB's actually accellerated since they were still running, but were now only supporting their own weight. The SRB's also went "squirrley" at that point since they were no longer guided. A bit later, probably less than a second, there were multiple explosions from the debris cloud that had previously been the tank. Remember, the SRB cut open the OXYGEN tank. That alone would not cause an explosion. It would cause nearly everything it touched to burn, but no explosion yet. Until it burned through the hydrogen tank and the liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen could mix. Then it goes off like, well, a rocket.... But if you do the math on it, I had nearly as good a view from 200 miles away and people at the Cape did....
The universe formed from a cosmic singularity. It exploded and all sorts of complex structures arose from this. One of them was Earth. The right bits and pieces and the right events happend to come together to form live. Life evolved from simple into complex forms. At all steps along the way, more complex things arose from simpler things. This "doesn't" happen, but clearly it did since we're all here. I see the science and agree that the scientist are more or less right. They refine the theories, but the fundamental steps are right, there, and provable. Yet they also defy entroy.
Therefore I firmly believe that Evolution, the Big Bang, etc are all true. We may not fully understand all the details, but they are fundemantally true. But I ALSO believer that intelligent design, a creator, is behind all of it. I do not believe that God went "poof" and created things as we see them, but I do belive that evolution, the big bang, and processes like this are how God works.
So, in short, evolution and ID are not mutually exclusive. I'm sure there are biblical literalists that would argue the point with me, but I don't see how you can take every word in the Bible literally when the Bible itself freely admits that much of itself is parable.
Run the commercials less often, maybe only once per half hour. Run fewer total commercials. But don't server everybody the SAME commercials. Make part of the "deal" for getting the PVR be that you will be asked to fill out a questionaire. You can leave it blank, or lie, but you will then be served irrelavant commercials. You will still get 2 min per half hour no matter what you answer, so you might as well answer honestly. You can skip them if you want, so it's up to the commercial writers to make sure you don't WANT to skip them. It actually INCREASES the number of ads the station can sell while DECREASING the ad time each individual gets. And since they can give real stats on the number of people they are reaching with each ad, they can vary the price of the ad accordingly. Almost like "pay per click" on the web. Add some interactivity to the ad so 1) people will bother to watch and interact with it, 2) you get some real stats as to whether they DID watch and interact with it....
The technology is all there. Use it. A TiVo is a PC! Even the crappy Explorer 8000 that the cable companies give away is a PC or sorts.
Here's the "fair to all" solution. Come up with a "wiki-like" meta tag system tha t exists completely outside the website. Your browser would do a 2nd lookup, kind of like DNS, and would lookup the "tags" associated with the site. People would be able to vote on the fairness of the tags, so if a porn site loaded up teh tags with "cute puppies", pretty soon the vote would force that tag out. You would get lots of peoples opinions on what the website contained. Then you could set your tolerance level as to what you would accept. You could opt in, or opt out, or unrated sites. Then the end user is in full control over what is or is not an acceptable site for them. And the content rating system is in control of EVERYBODY.
Well, no. But you COULD play your legally purchased Nintendo cartriges on a no name clone of the Nintendo console, provided that the console did not call itself a "Nintendo", "Nintendo clone", "NES", or "NES clone". The terms "Nintendo", "Nintendo Entertainment System", and "NES" are trademarked. Nintendo could potentially sue over the use of these terms. But the hardware itself is generic.
Taiwan claims they tried to negociate in good faith. Time will tell. They need the drug now, so the immediate action is justified. However we should expect that Roche will sue the Taiwanese government. If they are sincere, I would expect that they would ignore all orders to stop production, but would also settle any reasonable financial demand (oh, in the amount of the market value of the amount of drug they produced). If they do that, then the public need is satisfied AND the financial rights of Roche are also protected.
Something like only needs to be used once to be effective. After that, the mere idea that it exists is a deterrent. Two other examples of this working:
1) The ancient Israelites carried a large gilded box called the Ark of the Covenant in front of them into battle. They believed it could summon up the wrath of God on their enemies. Their enemies were not 100% sure that the Israelites weren't right. There is no evidence that the Ark ever actually did summon up the wrath of God, but boths sides beleived it and the Israelites beat enemies who had superior numbers on a number of occasions.
2) How many atomic bombs were actually ever used? Two. But the mere thought that a country has nuclear weapons gives them a bargaining position. And the the fact that the wrong country even MIGHT be trying to obtain them is reason to go to war.
In the ancient world, this "death ray" would have struck fear in the enemies hearts and minds, despite the fact that it might have serious limitations, or may not even work at all except in controlled situations. And one or two prominant demonstrations of such a weapon would go a long way toward keeping this fear going.
Temperature isn't really an issue. There are plenty of precedents for life using enzymes to run chemical reactions at speeds other than what they would usually run. Your very body "burns" sugar enzymatically at 98.6F instead of the 450+F it would burn at if you just lit it and let it burn.
Heck, oxygen isn't even really the issue. There's a lot of energy in those hydrogen bonds in the methane (and other hydrocarbon) molecules. The hydrogen just "likes" oxygen better than it does carbon, so the oxygen is a convenient way of coaxing the hydrogens off and releasing the energy. It's not the ONLY way of getting the hydrogens off. Decomposing complex hydrocarbons into simpler ones would work in the absence of oxygen.
Provided it could get the initial energy to start the reaction, it could probably enzymatically "burn" methane at low tempature and use the energy released to sustain the reaction. It would likely "live" slower than life on Rarth does since the low temperature would likely slow down reactions. It would then pass on this initial reaction energy to it's offspring to keep the cycle going.
Improbable sounding? Well just remember that on Earth a very similar thing happened. Life didn't just fire up the minute all the pieces came together. They've tried it. Recreate the conditions of primordial Earth in a tank. You get amino acids and other "life like" stuff, but no life, at least not immediatly. Something happened to impart that initial energy to get the cycle going.
The "N" thing is a dumb solution. MS should have allowed to BUNDLE anything they wanted. However there should be clear and clean options to include or exclude any of the bundled packages and a clear and clean way to REMOVE any packages an OEM chooses to install. Ever install Debian using the Sarge Installer? Ever use Aptitude on Debian? You can install as much or as little as you like and you can uninstall anything you like. Why can't Windows do that? The only bundled piece I have a REAL problem with is MSN Messenger. You can't friggin uninstall it! I actually wrote a "do nothing" application called msmsgs.exe and copied it over the real one to get rid of it!
Congratulations. You have entered a field where "book learning" means next to nothing and experience means everything. Given that you have just completed a Master's degree, you have been in school for about 6 years. Nearly everything you learned first year is obsolete. To succeed in this field you have to demonstrate an ability to continually learn and adapt. Degrees don't prove that. Getting "in field" and SURVIVING does. You are simply going to have to take a job that is "beneath" you and strut your stuff. If you are lucky, management sees what you can do and you will advance within that company. If you are less lucky, you will have to "job hop". Hold each step long enough to gain the experience (and credibility) needed to get to the next step. After 10 years or so nobody will look at your degrees any longer, just your resume. Every job I have ever gotten (and I've been doing this for 12 years) has been due to my understanding of the underlying businesses, not due to my technical experience.
Had you asked me a couple of years ago my advice would have been to follow up your Bachelors in Computer Science with an MBA rather than a Master's in Computer Science. Too many business managers do not understand Information Technology. Too many IT guys do not understand business. If you want to get rich and have a challenging career, be the guy who understand BOTH.
The DRM should not restrict what I can do with the file in any way shape or form. However I would accept having my ID stamped into the file. Maybe use steganography to bury my id throughout the file. That way if I use the file legally, it's no problem. But if I upload the file I can be identified. This would even make me reluctant to give the file to a single friend, since I am responsible if I loose control of the the file.
Slashdot Mirror
N/T
Either:
A) The renter has no job, no life, and no girlfriend/wife and watches 3 movies a day every day.
B) He's copying the movies to a hard drive and at best, watching them later or collecting them, and at worst, ripping to MPEG4 or VCD and distributing them.
POP3 and IMAP are wireless communication systems when they are used from my laptop connected via 802.11G!!!
Quick lesson on the OSI layers. POP3, IMAP, and the protocol RIM are using are all LAYER 7 stuff, Application layer. The fact that a network is wireless, fiber, ethernet, or carried by pigeon is a LAYER 1 thing... The RIM protocol is not inherently wireless. It's just a scheme for encoding and distributing bits. Those bits happen to be carried by a wireless network, but they could just as well be carried by pigeons.....
So SMS (Short Messaging Service) violates this pattent? I regularly e-mail stuff to "myphonenumber@vtext.com". It goes to Verizon's SMS server and gets pushed to my cell phone. If my phone is off or out of the area, it gets held on the server and pushed when I come back....
How does what RIM is doing infringe on NTP's patent, but POP3 or IMAP does not? If you send me an e-mail and my laptop is "out of range", that is "off" or "not in range of a 802.11 gateway" it goes to my mail server and waits there until I log on. Then I retrieve the buffered messages and display them on my "wireless device".
On top of that, a handheld cell phone does not put out 2 watts. It puts out a maximum of 0.6 watts, less if it can get a stable signal so that it can conserve battery power.
But it IS a free market issue. The network meets and exceeds what the government paid to subsidize, even WITH the bandwidth being witheld for IPTV. They are not preventing an end to end network by their actions. The internet is faster and more robust than it has ever been. But they are holding back a chunk of what they COULD provide. At the moment, absolutely NONE of the bits that comprise this message went across Verizon's network. I Verizon for my home phone, but I could use BrightHouse is I chose Brighthouse is VoIP, but the VoIP traffic stays entirely within BrightHouse's private network and it's quality actually exceeds the quality of the "conventional" phone service I get from Verizon. Or I could use Vonage (or any other VoIP provider) and pass the packets over either Brighthouse or Verizon's broadband connectoon. Or I could use a cell phone from one of a half dozen vendors. I have both Verizon and Brighthouse available to me as my last mile. I have 4 ISP's available through Brighthouse, including RoadRunner (the one I use). And very soon I will have both Verizon and Brighthouse as options for my cable TV, and of course there's always satelite. These changes are bringing MORE choice, not less.
Of course they have the RIGHT. They own the cable. Bought it, installed it, paid for it, and maintain the equipment that lights it up. Now, is it SMART for them to do so? Not sure. But do they have the right? Certainly. If you disagree, don't buy bandwidth from them. If enough people agree with you and don't buy bandwidth from them, then they will decide that it is not smart to hold back bandwidth for their own projects.
We're in a war. Like it or not we are. So... Allow the taps, restrict what can be done with the info. If they are listening for terrorist activity and hear about a drug deal, make sure they CANNOT use that information to prosecute the drug dealer. Restrict the use of the information to terrorist activity only. Clearly and narrowly define what is "terrorist activity".
At the time of the launch I lived in Sarasota, FL. Sarasota is on the west coast of Florida, just south of Tampa. Even though the Cape is on the East coast, nearly 200 miles away, you can clearly see the launches on a clear day. (Night launches are SPETACULAR, but that's another story) I was outside watching the launch. Even from 200 miles away, it was clear that the tank BURST first, the orbiter and solid rockets cut loose from the tank. The orbiter continued upward due to momentum. The SRB's actually accellerated since they were still running, but were now only supporting their own weight. The SRB's also went "squirrley" at that point since they were no longer guided. A bit later, probably less than a second, there were multiple explosions from the debris cloud that had previously been the tank. Remember, the SRB cut open the OXYGEN tank. That alone would not cause an explosion. It would cause nearly everything it touched to burn, but no explosion yet. Until it burned through the hydrogen tank and the liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen could mix. Then it goes off like, well, a rocket.... But if you do the math on it, I had nearly as good a view from 200 miles away and people at the Cape did....
I have been offered every single positon for which I have gotten a face to face interview. Headhunters get you that face time....
The universe formed from a cosmic singularity. It exploded and all sorts of complex structures arose from this. One of them was Earth. The right bits and pieces and the right events happend to come together to form live. Life evolved from simple into complex forms. At all steps along the way, more complex things arose from simpler things. This "doesn't" happen, but clearly it did since we're all here. I see the science and agree that the scientist are more or less right. They refine the theories, but the fundamental steps are right, there, and provable. Yet they also defy entroy.
Therefore I firmly believe that Evolution, the Big Bang, etc are all true. We may not fully understand all the details, but they are fundemantally true. But I ALSO believer that intelligent design, a creator, is behind all of it. I do not believe that God went "poof" and created things as we see them, but I do belive that evolution, the big bang, and processes like this are how God works.
So, in short, evolution and ID are not mutually exclusive. I'm sure there are biblical literalists that would argue the point with me, but I don't see how you can take every word in the Bible literally when the Bible itself freely admits that much of itself is parable.
Run the commercials less often, maybe only once per half hour. Run fewer total commercials. But don't server everybody the SAME commercials. Make part of the "deal" for getting the PVR be that you will be asked to fill out a questionaire. You can leave it blank, or lie, but you will then be served irrelavant commercials. You will still get 2 min per half hour no matter what you answer, so you might as well answer honestly. You can skip them if you want, so it's up to the commercial writers to make sure you don't WANT to skip them. It actually INCREASES the number of ads the station can sell while DECREASING the ad time each individual gets. And since they can give real stats on the number of people they are reaching with each ad, they can vary the price of the ad accordingly. Almost like "pay per click" on the web. Add some interactivity to the ad so 1) people will bother to watch and interact with it, 2) you get some real stats as to whether they DID watch and interact with it.... The technology is all there. Use it. A TiVo is a PC! Even the crappy Explorer 8000 that the cable companies give away is a PC or sorts.
Cylon Raider
Here's the "fair to all" solution. Come up with a "wiki-like" meta tag system tha t exists completely outside the website. Your browser would do a 2nd lookup, kind of like DNS, and would lookup the "tags" associated with the site. People would be able to vote on the fairness of the tags, so if a porn site loaded up teh tags with "cute puppies", pretty soon the vote would force that tag out. You would get lots of peoples opinions on what the website contained. Then you could set your tolerance level as to what you would accept. You could opt in, or opt out, or unrated sites. Then the end user is in full control over what is or is not an acceptable site for them. And the content rating system is in control of EVERYBODY.
Well, no. But you COULD play your legally purchased Nintendo cartriges on a no name clone of the Nintendo console, provided that the console did not call itself a "Nintendo", "Nintendo clone", "NES", or "NES clone". The terms "Nintendo", "Nintendo Entertainment System", and "NES" are trademarked. Nintendo could potentially sue over the use of these terms. But the hardware itself is generic.
Taiwan claims they tried to negociate in good faith. Time will tell. They need the drug now, so the immediate action is justified. However we should expect that Roche will sue the Taiwanese government. If they are sincere, I would expect that they would ignore all orders to stop production, but would also settle any reasonable financial demand (oh, in the amount of the market value of the amount of drug they produced). If they do that, then the public need is satisfied AND the financial rights of Roche are also protected.
Something like only needs to be used once to be effective. After that, the mere idea that it exists is a deterrent. Two other examples of this working:
1) The ancient Israelites carried a large gilded box called the Ark of the Covenant in front of them into battle. They believed it could summon up the wrath of God on their enemies. Their enemies were not 100% sure that the Israelites weren't right. There is no evidence that the Ark ever actually did summon up the wrath of God, but boths sides beleived it and the Israelites beat enemies who had superior numbers on a number of occasions.
2) How many atomic bombs were actually ever used? Two. But the mere thought that a country has nuclear weapons gives them a bargaining position. And the the fact that the wrong country even MIGHT be trying to obtain them is reason to go to war.
In the ancient world, this "death ray" would have struck fear in the enemies hearts and minds, despite the fact that it might have serious limitations, or may not even work at all except in controlled situations. And one or two prominant demonstrations of such a weapon would go a long way toward keeping this fear going.
Temperature isn't really an issue. There are plenty of precedents for life using enzymes to run chemical reactions at speeds other than what they would usually run. Your very body "burns" sugar enzymatically at 98.6F instead of the 450+F it would burn at if you just lit it and let it burn.
Heck, oxygen isn't even really the issue. There's a lot of energy in those hydrogen bonds in the methane (and other hydrocarbon) molecules. The hydrogen just "likes" oxygen better than it does carbon, so the oxygen is a convenient way of coaxing the hydrogens off and releasing the energy. It's not the ONLY way of getting the hydrogens off. Decomposing complex hydrocarbons into simpler ones would work in the absence of oxygen.
Provided it could get the initial energy to start the reaction, it could probably enzymatically "burn" methane at low tempature and use the energy released to sustain the reaction. It would likely "live" slower than life on Rarth does since the low temperature would likely slow down reactions. It would then pass on this initial reaction energy to it's offspring to keep the cycle going.
Improbable sounding? Well just remember that on Earth a very similar thing happened. Life didn't just fire up the minute all the pieces came together. They've tried it. Recreate the conditions of primordial Earth in a tank. You get amino acids and other "life like" stuff, but no life, at least not immediatly. Something happened to impart that initial energy to get the cycle going.
Burn it to CD. Rip the CD. DRM gone.
Maybe for some, but not for me (XP Home) "Error could not locate inf". Thanks for the effort, though...
The "N" thing is a dumb solution. MS should have allowed to BUNDLE anything they wanted. However there should be clear and clean options to include or exclude any of the bundled packages and a clear and clean way to REMOVE any packages an OEM chooses to install. Ever install Debian using the Sarge Installer? Ever use Aptitude on Debian? You can install as much or as little as you like and you can uninstall anything you like. Why can't Windows do that? The only bundled piece I have a REAL problem with is MSN Messenger. You can't friggin uninstall it! I actually wrote a "do nothing" application called msmsgs.exe and copied it over the real one to get rid of it!
Had you asked me a couple of years ago my advice would have been to follow up your Bachelors in Computer Science with an MBA rather than a Master's in Computer Science. Too many business managers do not understand Information Technology. Too many IT guys do not understand business. If you want to get rich and have a challenging career, be the guy who understand BOTH.
Helpdesk: Double click on "My Computer"
User: I can't see your computer.
Helpdesk: No, double click on "My Computer" on your computer.
User: Huh?
Helpdesk: There is an icon on your computer labled "My Computer". Double click on it.
User: What's your computer doing on mine?
The DRM should not restrict what I can do with the file in any way shape or form. However I would accept having my ID stamped into the file. Maybe use steganography to bury my id throughout the file. That way if I use the file legally, it's no problem. But if I upload the file I can be identified. This would even make me reluctant to give the file to a single friend, since I am responsible if I loose control of the the file.